


Four Things That Dylan and Jez Don't Have In Common (And One They Do)

by calathea



Category: Shooting Fish
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:57:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calathea/pseuds/calathea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a Five Things Meme, based on the British film "Shooting Fish"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Things That Dylan and Jez Don't Have In Common (And One They Do)

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by thefourthvine

**1\. People**

Dylan liked to be around other people, to the point where he occasionally found himself sitting for hours in random cafes or, once, in a hospital waiting room, because it was more interesting than being on his own. He blamed it on his early training because the orphanage had been nothing but other people, all the time, and you just got used to it after a while. He'd never really had a room of his own, certainly not as a child, and not often as an adult. Moving in with Jez, into the abandoned water cooling tower, was no hardship. In fact, it was amazing, because he got a vast space to play in, and company too.

As far as he could tell, Jez was always on his own, even when he was with a dozen other people. Dylan could stand in a room full of people, and in ten minutes he'd be telling some babe his life story (whichever one he was using that night) and have some guy's business card in his pocket. Jez could spend an hour in the same room without speaking to anyone. He never seemed to realize that was _bad_. It wasn't that Jez was shy – because he wasn't, really, he'd talk your ear off about his electronics and toasters and his latest mad scientist kick when he got going – he just seemed to_ like_ being off on his own somewhere, even if that somewhere was inside his own head.

Dylan never worked out exactly how they ended up living together, because they seemed to go straight from amateur B&amp;E and 'wow, wouldn't it be cool to live here' to sitting in a café around the corner with Jez scribbling To Do lists and little diagrams of electrical circuits on napkins, and talking about the best places to find skips with the materials they needed. He barely knew Jez, so he didn't know then how incredibly unlikely it was that Jez would move in with him like that. It was fine, though. Dylan liked being with Jez because he liked people, and Jez just seemed to like being with Dylan.

**2\. Hedonism**

A guy he once spent the weekend with exploring the _Gay Karma Sutra_ said he thought Dylan was a hedonist. Once Dylan got over thinking it was some kind of Scottish insult, and after he'd got Jez to look it up in a dictionary and read out the definition, he decided that was exactly what he was. _Hedonist_. It sounded like a damn good thing to be.

If there was pleasure to be had, Dylan was there, with knobs on, as Jez would say. (And really, the English were incomprehensible; because what the hell did_ knobs_ have to do with it?) There wasn't anything he heard about that he didn't want to try at least once, though he was saving the mind-altering substances for when he was old and grey and couldn't get his kicks any other way. What was the point, he liked to ask Jez, if you weren't having _fun_?

Jez never seemed to have an answer, although he agreed happily enough that scamming people was fun, and diving into skips for mislaid treasure was fun, and saving their money to buy a stately home together was fun. The other stuff, though, he didn't seem interested in. Dylan would tell him the dirtiest details of his wild weekends, and Jez would either ask deflating technical questions and demand diagrams, or (and this was actually fun, for Dylan at least, and therefore the preferred outcome) he'd turn pink and try to change the subject. Jez never had stories like that of his own, and Dylan refused to accept that toasters were fun in any universe.

**3\. Anger**

Dylan had a list (a mental one, of course) of all the people who had ever done him wrong, starting with Jason McCoy, who stole his cookies during recess on the first day of kindergarten, and ending with the employee at the coffee shop who short-changed him on Friday. When he couldn't sleep, sometimes, he would review his list and assign a fitting punishment to each of them. Most were pretty simple: Jason McCoy -- break into his no doubt pleasant suburban home with maximum collateral damage (Dylan liked the idea of a battering ram) and steal only his cookie jar; short-changing clerk at the coffee shop -- pay him next time in an assortment of foreign coins that were the same shape and size as British coins, but had no net worth. Others were impossibly complex, like his scheme to fake a huge lottery win for the family who had taken him in with a view to adoption, and then returned him to the children's home two weeks later claiming he had behaviour problems.

Dylan thought his desire to crush his enemies was normal until he met Jez, who couldn't seem to get mad at all, or not for more than a few seconds at a time, not even with him. He could say Jez was ugly in front of a girl Jez obviously liked, and Jez would just glare at him, then blush and grin a little, even if Dylan ended up in her bed that night while Jez went home alone. Maybe that was the secret of why they stayed friends for so long, when neither of them had had a relationship in their lives that had survived the constant moves between children's homes and foster placements and shitty jobs and crumbing one-room apartments: Jez couldn't stay angry, and Dylan never had to say he was sorry.

**4\. Nightmares**

Girls, in Dylan's experience, talked a lot about things that men would really prefer they kept quiet about. Georgie and Floss talked a _lot_, and they weren't always too careful about where they talked.

"He's so sweet to me," Georgie cooed, on the subject of her sex life, and Dylan thought that if Jez could hear her, he'd blush, and insist that they stop eavesdropping. But Dylan had learned early in life that eavesdropping _paid_ and also, he had no morals, so he just inched a little closer to the open door. "He sleeps so quietly, like a little boy. Not like Roger, d'you remember Roger? Snored like an elephant and was always groping me in his sleep. Jez doesn't snore, he barely moves. He's lovely."

Floss said something that started with his name, and Dylan rediscovered his morals and walked away quickly. He rarely stayed the night in someone else's bed, but it was hard to convince a girl that you had to go home when you lived two doors down the hall. Floss had been sympathetic the first night his nightmares woke her up, and the second, and even the third, which was more than he'd expected. After he refused point-blank to discuss it with her, she was the one who suggested that he go back to his own bed most nights.

But Jez understood. He _knew_ in the ways that only someone with that shared, separate childhood could know. At night in the water-cooling tower, when Dylan's dreams would disturb him, little noises echoing hollowly round the cylindrical building, he'd scurry across the cold concrete floor and into Dylan's bed to wake him up and hold his hand. In the morning, Jez would just say, "All right, mate?" and get out of bed.

Dylan knew exactly how quietly Jez slept, how little Jez moved in the night. He knew how tightly Jez would hold on, if he were allowed.

**5\. Home**

When Jez's marriage broke up after just two years, Dylan wasn't happy. Of course he wasn't happy: he might be an asshole but Jez was his best friend, and divorce wasn't something to be cheerful about. So of course he wasn't happy.

Maybe he was a little bit _relieved_, though.

The problem was that after the first six months, the stately home turned out not to be all he and Jez had expected. _Stately_, he had discovered, meant heating bills that rivalled the national debt of small African nations, and the ceiling in the west wing falling down and having to hire a builder with _specialist Grade II Listed experience_ rather than relying on Jez and Dylan, a ladder, and a book on plastering. It meant going to boring local events where the upper crust talked to him in tones that said _polite tolerance_ but with facial expressions that screamed _uncouth colonial,_ while the local yokels called him a toff and wouldn't give him the time of day.

In short, _stately_ just didn't mean _fun_.

But Jez was there, and he did like Georgie and Floss, even after it was all over between them, and the kids in the residential wing were great, and he could have learned to live with _stately_ if it had been _home_. But it wasn't their home, not really, it was Georgie and Floss', and they tended to stare blankly when either of them made a suggestion about changing something and say things like _but we've always done it this way, since the family moved here in 1267 AD._ You just couldn't argue with tradition, apparently, no matter how stifling and boring and stupid was.

Georgie didn't make it home for Jez either. She nagged him to join InfoTech full-time, the way they wanted him to, as if she didn't know Jez would wither away if you made him wear a suit every day and go to meetings and have a dayplanner. She didn't seem to need Jez; she didn't even really seem to want him after the first few months (which led to a painful discussion between him and Jez when he tried to figure out if Jez just wasn't doing it _right_). When Dylan was being particularly cruel about her inside his head, he wondered if she saw Jez as more highly functioning version of her brother, who she could coax into her sensible, grown-up world in a way that she never could with Robin.

Dylan didn't know what finally finished the marriage and he wasn't sure he cared. When Jez walked away, Dylan went with him without a backward glance.

The first night, they shared a room in a Travelodge in Slough. When Dylan's dreams woke them in the night, Jez climbed into bed with him and held his hand.

It's always been a matter of shame to Dylan that he found his home in _Slough,_ of all places.


End file.
